


Give me a reason to stay

by yunhaiiro



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And all his Feelings, Captain America: The First Avenger, Gen, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Pre-Slash, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, TW for some very bad words said by 1940s soldiers, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-15 16:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14794352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunhaiiro/pseuds/yunhaiiro
Summary: He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand.― "Anyway", Richard SikenIt was weird, being so in awe of Steve Rogers, way before the whole world knew his name, and still try to hide it from everyone, including himself. But that was Bucky's life, once.





	Give me a reason to stay

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you as always to [dfotw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dfotw/pseuds/dfotw) for the beta and the cheering and everything else.

Bucky is just now realizing that he has always been looking at Steve.

He has joked before that he used to have to look down at Steve and now he has to look ever so slightly up.

But what he has never joked about, never even said out loud, is that he’s not only looking, but _watching_ him.

Back when he had to look down, he had a habit of watching Steve’s hands. Specially when he was drawing, movements even more measured and purposeful than usual, small patches of charcoal on his pale skin. Bucky had tried drawing classes, too, mostly because of Steve’s insistence. But he had dropped it soon after. He wasn’t as good.

But Bucky also tended to watch Steve closely in all kinds of situations.

Steve was not a bad liar. His voice didn’t betray him. His face did, sometimes, only because Bucky knew him so well he could pick up on it even when other people couldn’t.

But Steve’s hands couldn’t lie. They fidgeted when he was nervous. They wound into fists when he got angry. They gripped Bucky’s arm, tightly, when he was truly scared.

When Steve was overwhelmed, and couldn’t even calm down by drawing, he bit his nails until Bucky had to take his hands into his own to keep him from drawing blood.

They were always cold.

Bucky also remembers Steve trying to warm them in specially harsh winter days, stubbornly rubbing and breathing on them until Bucky had enough and also held them. Steve usually refused to look at him in the eye while they were like that. Bucky found it adorable.

He had thought about those quiet moments a lot, when he left for the front. He was already thinking about those the last day before shipping out, while they were surrounded by the crowd at the Stark Expo. Even when there was a flying car onstage, Bucky was looking at Steve, as always. Trying to memorize every single gesture, every facial feature. Just in case he…

Just in case.

“Don’t do anything stupid”, he tells Steve.

He’s also been telling himself that.

He goes back to the girls, leaving Steve to try once again to get recruited.

Bucky has to ship out very early in the morning. He thinks that maybe it’s for the best that they parted ways there. He thinks, if he had spent the night at home, and had gotten up and dressed while Steve slept on the other side of the room or, even worse, while Steve looked at him, bleary-eyed and looking jealous and also worried, if he had had to say goobye then and there… Maybe he would’ve done something he might’ve regretted, like deciding not to go, or saying something he shouldn’t.

As it is, a quick hug is all they get, and the last image he has of Steve is him standing in line next to guys twice his size and surrounded by patriotic propaganda posters.

 

* * *

 

War is… rough.

Bucky didn’t expect any different. That was what he had signed up for. The marches. The trenches. Getting shot at. Shooting back. Feeling grateful for every second of respite, every minute without bullets flying in the air.

He didn’t count on how bad silence became. It meant something was wrong, or something was going to go wrong, because an ambush was waiting for them, or something had already gone wrong. The sound of grieving is always silence.

Losing people, men you had talked with just the day before, was bad enough. But the silence let everyone think. And Bucky was increasingly aware his mind was becoming a worse place to be than the battlefield.

The soldiers usually talked to each other about what they had done in the past, back home. Happier times. Some dared to speak of the future. Marrying girlfriends, going back to their families, to their kids. When these people died, those were the worst silences.

Bucky did think often about his sister, his mother. How he missed them.

But Bucky thought about Steve entirely too much.

Some men had pictures of their loved ones with them. A tiny part of Bucky wished he had brought one of Steve, no matter how much ribbing from the other soldiers it would’ve caused. Or snatched one of his drawings, folded it a million times and kept it in his pocket for good luck.

He really misses looking at his hands while he draws. He misses holding them with whatever excuse he could come up with.

Bucky wonders, for the umpteenth time, how Steve is doing, if he is eating properly, if he is getting enough sleep. If he’s tried to join the army again.

If he also thinks of him, sometimes.

 

* * *

 

“People have been saying Hitler’s rounding up more than just the Jews.”

Everyone keeps chewing their food around the campfire, Sergeant Barnes included. Another man looks at the soldier who had just spoken.

“What ‘people’?”

The soldier shrugs. “The guys who are closing down the working camps. Say they’ve found people who weren’t Jews in there.”

“Heard about it too”, another soldier pipes up. “Gipsies and stuff.”

One more joins in. “I heard they put retarded people in there too. And everyone they think isn’t worth much or can’t work.”

“We should’ve had a division made up of every kind of people Hitler hates and put it in the forefront. Losing to them would really make the Nazis mad.”

“Thought we left all of those back home for a reason. They don’t even let the negroes be on the same units as us.”

“Yeah, imagine a unit made out of every guy who tried to get into the army and got a 4F. Hitler would laugh in our faces.”

By this point, only Barnes and one other soldier haven’t said anything. They’ve both stopped eating. Barnes puts down his can and fork and gets up.

The soldier who had spoken first looks at him.

“Where you going? You ain’t gonna finish that?”

“I’m not hungry anymore. You can have it.”

The soldier doesn’t waste time reaching for the discarded can, while Barnes slinks away into the darkness.

He ends up with his back resting against a wall, staring ahead into nothing. Not too far away from the group, because he knows this is still very much enemy territory, but far enough.

He’s not exactly surprised when the other soldier who hadn’t spoken up joins him, offering him a cigarrette.

Barnes didn’t use to smoke. It would’ve killed Steve, maybe even literally.

But thinking about Steve does make him need to smoke right now.

He accepts it with a nod and waits while the other man produces a match and lits it, then does the same with his own cigarrette. He reclines on the wall as well.

They spend a moment in silence.

“That got to you, too?”

Barnes takes a drag before answering.

“A bit.” Pause. “You?”

“Yeah, I…” the man sighs. “I’ve also heard about that shit. I don’t know how they can joke about it.”

Barnes shrugs. It’s either laugh or they would never stop crying. He doesn’t say it out loud. They both know that.

The man sighs once more, takes a drag of his own, and blows the smoke in a slow breath out.

“My sister is deaf”, he confesses, in a quiet voice. “From birth, so she can’t speak that well either. People have thought she’s retarded before. And I’ve also heard people say that…” he takes a shuddering breath. “That she’s a burden to us. And that was back home. In America. It just…” He pauses and can’t seem to find the words to continue.

Barnes shakes his head.

“I know what you mean.”

“Of all the things that keep me up at night, the worst is thinking… what if we lose, and… the same things the Nazis are doing to their own people, they start doing to ours?”

That has also been a nightmare playing out in Bucky’s head.

He throws the butt of the cigarrette to the ground and stomps on it with his heel. Then clasps the shoulder of the other soldier with a sure hand.

“That’s why we’re here. We’re not letting those bastards win.”

The soldier smiles tiredly.

“Thank you, Sarge.”

“Anytime.” He also smiles. His face betrays nothing.

Barnes leaves, but not back to the group yet. Now he  _really_ needs a moment alone.

He slowly opens the hand he has clamped into a fist without realizing.

 

* * *

 

He really believes he’s hallucinating.

He welcomes it.

Bucky looks up at Steve’s face, and his vision is still blurry from whatever they had put in his eyes. But Steve can’t be here. Maybe he’s just dying. Maybe he’s just so much of a sap that the last person he sees while dying is Steve.

“Bucky? Bucky, it’s me!”

Steve releases him from the table and he rolls off it. Steve helps him to his feet and holds him up. Bucky is looking at what should be the height of Steve’s head. He can only see his chest. He looks up, bewildered.

“I thought you were dead!” Steve is smiling.

“… I thought you were smaller.”

Bucky is gripping Steve’s shoulders. This isn’t a hallucination.

Steve chuckles and puts an arm under his own, and hoists him away from the table and towards freedom.

“What happened to you?”

“I joined the Army”, Steve answers, as if it were obvious.

Bucky is still stumbling through the corridors, Steve four steps ahead. From this position, he can really see the extent of the changes.

“Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

Typical Steve.

Bucky looks up and down at him, as if he could guess where it had hurt. He notices how broad Steve’s back is now.

“Is it permanent?”

“So far.”

Bucky feels a tiny tinge of something, but he can’t quite tell what it is, and right now they don’t have the time.

 

* * *

 

After their encounter with Red Skull, Bucky is starting to think that maybe he  _is_ hallucinating everything, after all.

Steve helps him over the railing, holds tight onto his arm for a second.

It must be Steve. A stranger wouldn’t care so much.

Bucky sets his jaw and starts walking on the steel beam. He doesn’t look down. Only ahead. He’s gonna make it, goddamnit.

   _I’m not dying with Steve here. I’m not dying while Steve is watching me._

The beam drops and he runs and jumps and barely makes it to the other side. Steve is across him, now trapped. Bucky starts to panic.

“Gotta be a rope or something!”

Steve waves him off. “Just go! Get out of here!”

Bucky almost throws himself back over the railing. “ _No!_ Not without you!”

Steve exhales with an “Oh my God” before grasping and bending his own side of the railing outwards and then taking a run up before jumping.

 

* * *

 

There’s a long trek back to base camp. Bucky spends half of it helping those wounded who sometimes lagged behind, and the other half ahead of the whole group, just two steps behind Steve and staring at him more and more flagrantly as the hours passed.

Steve must have noticed, but he doesn’t mention it.

Bucky stops looking ahead over the treeline to glance at Steve’s back one more time. Here and now, with the helmet, and the shield, and the bright blue uniform showing though his ripped jacket, and his whole… body shape… it really doesn’t look like Steve at all. Captain America was some buff guy in tights they got to pose for propaganda. That certainly wasn’t _his_ Steve.

The man himself must have felt Bucky’s stare, because he turns his head and stares back at him, exasperated.

They keep marching like that, neither saying a thing. Bucky is very aware of all the men surrounding them. Dugan is alternatively looking at one and then the other and before he can make up his mind and intervene, Steve turns his gaze ahead with a sigh.

Bucky feels like he won that one, but at the same time, like he lost.

He keeps walking behind Captain America.

 

* * *

 

Even if Bucky is being a dick, and he knows it, as soon as they reach the camp and the soldiers start cheering Steve still searches for his eyes and smiles at him and gives him a pat on the back. Bucky doesn’t react.

Until after every soldier in the camp has gone out to greet them, and then he shouts:

“Hey!”

He takes a quick breath.

“Let’s hear it for Captain America!”

Everyone cheers. But by the way Steve frowns and looks at him, he knows what he’s trying to convey.

   _Now we really need to talk._

 

 

* * *

 

“Bucky.”

He has agreed to come along to a quiet spot with Steve, but now he stubbornly refuses to even acknowledge his presence.

“Bucky. Look at me.”

Now Bucky is the one to frown, and he keeps his gaze on the ground.

“Bucky”, he repeats once more, not quite threatening, but he takes him by the arm and that startles Bucky way more than it should. Steve releases him immediately.

“Are you okay?”

He doesn’t sound angry or annoyed anymore, just concerned.

All fight goes out of Bucky and now he just feels like shit. He looks up, finally.

“Yeah. Just tired. How are you holding up?”

Steve chuckles and shrugs with one shoulder. Point-waves at himself with the other arm.

Bucky takes the excuse to look at him up and down. He licks his lips. He also points at him, at his chest, and after a second stabs him with that finger. Steve is looking into his eyes with an undecipherable expression.

“What the hell happened to you, really?”

Bucky tries to laugh through the question, but it comes out as a croak.

Steve sighs and takes Bucky’s hand on his chest into his own. They’re so big now. And warm.

Steve takes a breath.

“On the Stark Expo, after you left…”

 

* * *

 

Steve joins Bucky on the bar after talking to Dum Dum and the others and Bucky smiles broadly at him right until the second Steve stops looking at him.

“See? I told you. They’re all idiots.” He takes a swig from his glass.

Steve sits down next to him and asks without missing a beat:

“How about you? You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”

Bucky doesn’t even look at him as he answers.

“Hell no. That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight…” Now Bucky looks up and hopes his own eyes are saying as much as he feels Steve’s are telling him. He swallows, a nervous reflex. “I’m following him.”

He drinks again, but then leans in and says in a low, husky voice:

“But you’re keeping the outfit, right?”

Steve sighs exasperatedly but still smiles at him, as if considering humouring him.

“You know what? It’s kind of growing on me.”

  _Is that the only things that grew?_ Bucky thinks, but does not actually ask, because that is a conversation probably best left for a less crowded place.

Agent Carter walks in on their side of the bar and they both stand up in a hurry.

“Captain.”

Steve answers in a second: “Agent Carter.”

“Ma’am”, Bucky says.

She has barely glanced at him. She goes back to staring right at Steve.

“Howard has some equipment for you to try. Tomorrow morning?”

“Sounds good.”

Agent Carter looks at the rest of their people, once again completely looking over Bucky.

“I see you top squad is prepping for duty”, she says, in which sounds like sneering but might just be the British accent.

“You don’t like music?”, Bucky asks, with a smirk.

Agent Carter doesn’t look at him. At all.

“I do, actually. I might even, when this is all over, go dancing.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Not. One. Look.

“The right partner. 0800, Captain.”

Steve nods as Agent Carter is already walking away.

“Yes, ma’m. I’ll be there.”

Bucky is actually irritated now, confused about why exactly he is so, and a tiny part of him says  _Can you blame her not looking at you? Look at him now._

Bucky does turn back to look at Steve.

Then he quips:

“I’m invisible. I’m… I’m turning into you. It’s like some horrible dream.” He is trying to joke about it, but it’s sounding too sincere.

“Don’t take it so hard.” Steve pats him on the shoulder. “Maybe she’s got a friend.”

Bucky tries very hard not to think of the implications of that.

Steve sits down at the bar again, and Bucky does the same, and then drinks a lot more.

 

* * *

 

Bucky’s focus has shifted.

After Steve’s… change, he no longer looks at Steve’s hands whenever he can. He finds himself, without meaning to, now, more often than not, staring at his back.

It makes sense. Steve is their leader. He’s always ahead. Bucky is a marksman and has to hang back. His job is, literally, guarding Steve’s (and everyone’s) backs. Even when he manages to disable an enemy marksman, and Steve fucking _salutes_ at him and gives away his position, and then he has to move and find a new spot to make sure no one gets the drop on his still just as reckless but now a significantly bigger target of a friend.

But once he’s sure there’s no one else lurking in the shadows with a rifle, he always turns the scope back to Steve. He’s surprised there isn’t a burned imprint of him on the glass.

When they’re walking closer, on patrol, or sneaking somewhere, that damn shield is always in the way.

The paint is always burnt somewhere where the bullets had hit, but the metal remains solid no matter what Steve defended himself from. Hydra’s weapons haven’t managed to make even a dent. For that, Bucky can be grateful. But he still feels like the shield belongs to Captain America, and because of that, wearing it makes him less Steve. It just stands like a wall between them.

He tries not to dwell on it, but he is starting to think that he’s becoming obsessed with Steve’s back because it keeps feeling farther and farther away. Like he can never reach it at this point.

On the Eastern Front, surrounded by snow right before jumping onto a train, they have a rare moment of standing side by side. Bucky leans the absolute slightest so their shoulders are touching. Steve notices, and leans back onto him too, smiling. And Bucky thinks  _maybe we could still be equals_.

A few minutes later, they jump.

 

* * *

 

They were expecting an ambush, but Hydra still manages to spring it on them. Bucky becomes more and more agitated as he keeps wasting bullets and Hydra goons are still standing. Once he resorts to his gun, empty rifle already discarded, he’s covered in sweat. He doesn’t know where Steve is. He may have to make his way through the bastards to get to him.

He runs out of bullets on his gun too.

He hears a _whoosh_ and raises his head to see Steve on the other side of the door behind him. He throws him his own gun and with Steve’s distraction Bucky finally hits what he thinks is the last Hydra lackey.

“I had him on the ropes”, he hears himself saying.

“I know you did.”

They hear a charging weapon sound behind them.

“Get down!”

Steve sweeps him out of the way and covers himself with his shield. He get thrown back, and a side of the train opens into the cold wind.

The shield is on the ground, and Bucky grabs it, hard, and starts shooting.

But it still gets shot out of his hand in a second. It’s almost as if the shield shouts  _No, not you_.

Now he’s grabbing at the rail, the only thing keeping him from a dead drop into a frozen river.

Steve takes the shield and throws it at the enemy, then takes off his helmet in one swift gesture before running towards Bucky.

Maybe he’s shouting his name. Bucky can only hear the wind. The same one that’s whipping Steve’s hair in every direction. He starts climbing down to his side. Bucky doesn’t dare move towards him.

And even though he doesn’t, the rail still collapses before either of them can do anything about it.

Bucky shouts.

Steve shouts.

Bucky falls.

 

* * *

 

Bucky forgets about Steve.

The Winter Soldier has no need for memories.

“Я готов отвечать.”

_Ready to comply._

**Author's Note:**

> I want to do this for all of the films, but I'm still in the middle of writing the one for The Winter Soldier because the feelings are too much. You'll know if I ever finish it.
> 
> Thank you for reading and every appreciation and feedback will be treasured forever.


End file.
